Now there’s a new kid on the tabletop block in the shape of Revolution: Virtual Playspace. Aimed at cooperative pen and paper RPGs rather than boardgames, it supports up to ten players and comes with a host of editors.

The video below gives a good overview of what’s included and Revolution is available now through both Steam Early Access and itch.io.

Here’s a text summary:

Virtual Playspace is a 3D Digital Virtual Tabletop that focuses on co-op Miniatures play. Create your own Maps, Quests, Conversations, Items, Miniatures, Stores, Loot Drop Lists.. and then play your adventures or entire campaigns with up to 10 people as if you were playing a pen & paper or miniatures game around a tabletop, using any rule system you like. With our Battle Rules system you can enjoy single player, multi-player and co-op play. It also offers multiple Playsets to open up the freedom to play many other game types like, Modern Combat, Vehicle Combat, Space Combat, Mech Combat and Super Heroes & Villains.

I don’t have any local friends who play pen and paper RPGs so I’d definitely be up for something like this, although I don’t think I have any distant friends who’d be willing to learn how all of the editors and whatnot work in order to take the lead. I need more nerd-chums.

Confession time. When I first heard about Tabletop Simulator, I thought it was a gag game, along the lines of Grass and Rock Simulator. It didn’t seem particularly unlikely and I briefly imagined a future in which my job involved reviewing Cup Simulator, Spoon Simulator and Rug Simulator. “So this is the future,” I thought, briefly wondering if I was now a man out of time, like an ageing music critic encountering a Moog for the first time.

More seriously, TtS’s emphasis on the physicality of components works against it (because even a klutz like me can handle things more adroitly with hands than the somewhat awkward mouse control TTS offers) for the kind of uses Revolution seems to be going for, so this could be of interest.

You know what’s funny is that we never planned on having a “flip table” function, but the Kickstarter crowd was loud and we gave in! The nice thing is that we added functionality for people to disable it.

Also, we’ve improved physics quite a bit so it’s more user friendly. There are things like ‘semi-lock’ (which needs to be enabled) which keeps things stabilized so if you throw dice against some game pieces, they won’t knock over. And more recently, we added ‘auto raise’, so any objects you are holding will lift up over other pieces preventing collision. But then of course if you toss that piece, then it will knock them over (unless you turn on semi-lock!), so there are all kinds of ways you can tweak things to make game play more suited for you. There’s still a lot more improvements we’ll be making as well. Thanks! :)

Now this is good news. From what I’ve seen of it, Tabletop Simulator is more suitable for simple physical-piece games like chess or mahjong or poker or Chapayev, but I was always more interested in pen-and-paper RPGs and wargames, which I think are a bit hard to pull off when you have to move each piece in a physical environment. Plus it looks like Revolution has more native support for the writing-and-math-heavy parts of RPGs and wargames. And for people who don’t even have any real friends in the same city (or hell, the same country) as they are, a robust environment for more complex tabletop games can be of great use.

Looks like it could be great for people who really like all those tactical combat games, but for pretty much anyone who doesn’t like spending ages setting up combat encounters and stuff like that it’s gona be pretty much useless compared to something like roll20.